The most outstanding characteristic of Yasmine Hatimi’s photography is its compelling sense of place. Her work highlights Moroccan communities in a manner that is realist and unadorned yet full of tender experiments: shades, gazes, stark architecture. Leaping beyond her previous projects on Moroccan masculinity and culture — including La chasse aux papillons and Amarcord — her new portfolio of images offers a unique interiority.
Hatimi’s immersive photography documents the rapid infrastructural developments in Morocco ahead of the 2030 World Cup. Several high-rise structures replace mosques and old buildings, the world she depicts is one upturned by the “clang of cranes” and “towers of steel” as she notes in her portfolio statement.
There’s loss in the photos we see: crumpled walls, thick rubble, dying fields. Add the striking photo where blocks in a tower coalesce into a series of white boxes and we are left with a contrasting sense of the infinite. With a structure so uniform that the individual unit is lost within a collective set of squares, the photo mirrors the shattering of a local community where individual homes are sacrificed for dizzying heights and repetitive forms.
It’s all jarring: the tall, glassy penthouse, the elusive white. A quote from Arthur in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Inception comes to mind, “In a dream, you can cheat architecture into impossible shapes.” Upon sighting Hatimi’s photos of new high rises in Morocco, one is likely bedazzled. Although these are not the spaceships and magnificent symmetry one finds in Nolan’s sci-films, there’s a focal nuance and attention to architecture that’s just as visually appealing and memorable, a sense of awe created by the angles we’re given.
Anyone can photograph skyscrapers but not everyone can edge us out of lintels and entrances, pulling us into the skies and the blues they hold. Hatimi’s photos give us blocks that seem to chase the skies, with high rises that are almost as tall as neighboring palm trees. We don’t see the Grand Stade Hassan II, set to be the world’s largest football stadium with a capacity of 115,000 people, but we are offered traces of such projects. In the pictures, we can feel how the arrival of fancy billion-dollar constructions spring up too quick. Even without humans punctuating the images, we can empathize with the wildness of forced demolitions.
All that glitters in the world Hatimi depicts is money and power, not urban planning or justice. Hatimi’s photos contextualize a nuanced reality that’s common across Africa: the shattering of local communities, the dishing of slums and shanties to estate developers without compensation for the displaced residents.
"The last mosque in the neighborhood, whose demotition is planned very soon."
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I grew up in Nigeria and have only been to Morocco once. I remember being disoriented by Arabic signposts in Casablanca. The city felt great but unfamiliar. Seeing Hatimi’s photographs triggers an interiority I would never have accessed during my time there. It almost makes me feel nostalgic.
Old buildings from my childhood keep popping in my dreams. I grew up mostly in Ketu, which was delightful and dynamic until 2010, when state government agencies demolished the Ajelogo market and the homes of some traders there. No displaced person was compensated, and although my family was unaffected and moved to another part of Lagosshortly after, the memory stayed with me. I kept wondering where the displaced residents would move to, what the rubble that sat in place of shacks and shanties would become. Despite numerous land disputes and some media features on the displaced residents, nothing happened eventually. When I returned to Lagos in late 2024, a new estate was commissioned in the exact same area that had been destroyed. I felt torn.
I feel a similar ache when I catch a snippet of the cranes and forklifts and chainsaws seeping into a douar that was once communal. One wonders what building is doomed to fall next. Is it the mosque, with its pink minaret and sacred years? Or a school yard with its hibiscuses, brugmansia, bougainvillea?
The varied tonality in Hatimi’s photos is perhaps the most laudable thing about the portfolio. Moving beyond fancy buildings, home becomes a site of violence. The resulting agony isn’t just about displacement. It’s about the rubbles, the lost security. It distils several news reports on forced demolitions in Morocco and Africa at large. The juxtaposition of swift modernization with debris and lost homes is done with an approach that’s illuminating and yet quotidian. Amid the novel heights and swift demolitions is a redefinition of home’s traces, alive with lonely cats and stolen childhoods.
"More and more constructions in the city of Casablanca, proof of a developing country."
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One can feel grim days and crispy dusks in Hatimi’s work, a world drawn from a well of memory deep in nostalgia. Some images feel dreamy — the petals in the water gun photo particularly are — while photos full of debris feel like a nightmare, tinged with a sense of the irresolute. We become witnesses with each inanimate trace Hatimi leaves us with.
Without didactic portraits, we meet the complex reality numerous Moroccans are grappling with. With tall frivolities littering the streets where love and communal buildings once stood, a great sense of discontinuity rules the communityHatimi presents. One can imagine historical sites being replaced by hotels and towers, one can envision a returnee pointing at old buildings, shocked by the foreign texture of what was once home. Amid a larger community’s collapse, there is a subtle question underlying the photos: how much of home can be lost?
This question, along with the inanimate objects in the photos, brings Jacques Derrida’s abstruse philosophies to life. In Speech and Phenomena, the French philosopher argues that “the element of presence is modified whenever it is a question of self-presence in consciousness”. One notes such a modification of presence in a good number of Hatimi’s photos. Blurry construction photos exemplify capitalist greed—a Morocco where work must continue, day or night. The thick fog present in two of such photos allegorises a life where the future is unknowable. There’s a feeling of desperation for new heights—its force is so intense that one can imagine workers toiling in the dark, gathering construction timbers with dim lighting that ruins their eyes and lives instead of illuminating their paths.
The rhythm of a community life is threatened. It’s real, sad and terrifying. The photo of a faded wall grounds the philosophical concept of “modified presence” with a tangible and heartbreaking detail. It stands out not just because of the terracotta-colored plaster peeking out but a wheelbarrow at the far right. We are gifted with what I’d consider a peek into nomadic ordeals, a life marked by shifting iterations of home. With both shards of newness and old treasures shattered all around, the wheelbarrow holds a trace of its own. We don’t know who owns it — a trader, laborer or a farmer — and implies a diminished breadth of domesticity, a world where cranes and forklifts outdo the prior tools and technology of the land. Home and its feeling of shelter become too precarious to know anymore.
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Yasmine Hatimi’s photography presents an aesthetic tension that is both immediate and profound. Her portfolio documents the radical transformation of Moroccan urban and peri-urban spaces, imposing a visual collision between the rapid ascent of cold, modern infrastructure and the messy, vital traces of community life being displaced. This contrast creates a layer of deliberate and multifaceted beauty.
With new towers, beauty is expansive and imposing, full of uniform blocks. Via small and intimate objects captured—the pink hair tie on an asphalt road, the laundry line fluttering near a satellite—beauty becomes fragile, a reminder of what was once home. Bright colors accompany such fleeting emblems of good old times, albeit with jarring placements. The pink bow, separated from its subject, appears to be a discarded or misplaced accessory, tinted by the absence of the person who once wore it. This dynamic—the dislocation of an individual object amid rough gravel—is a miniature representation of the sweeping displacements happening across Morocco.
The wilting flower petals in the photo of the water gun establish the complexity of communal loss: one that is not just about collapsing buildings but also the loss of playgrounds and childlike joy. The contrast between a nostalgic past and an ever-shifting present is what lends Hatimi’s work its unique gravity.
In Hatimi’s photos, home is not just a feeling of shelter or a daydream, it’s a site of vulnerable beauty, with an emphasis on architectural change over human witnesses. Where photographers like Brian Otieno document the resilience of residents in Kenyan slums, or Prince Gyasi reshapes home with saturated portraits, Hatimi focuses on the destruction of individual homes. Her work turns to the violence inflicted on displaced objects, the weight of human history being swept away. Small objects, then, are not just beautiful; they are defiant monuments to the personal stories that modernization attempts to erase. In a world that is cosmopolitan yet sinister, we are gifted the remainder of a dream, a game of impossible shapes.
Ife O. Olatona is a Johns Hopkins alumni and multidisciplinary writer. In 2021, he was spotlighted by the British daily, The Times, as one of five young poets under 25 to watch. He has previously co-curated a poetry exhibit at the National Museum of Language in the U.S. An alum of the Black Playwrights’ Gathering at the Kennedy Center—America’s national cultural center—his writing has published by Transition Magazine, The Poetry Society U.K, The Massachusetts Review, The Chicago Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
Throughout January, Tender Photos will showcase Yasmine Hatimi's work on the changes in the Moroccan landscape. This essay by Ife O. Olatona will be followed by a short story by Shubnum Khan. For press, sponsorship and other media inquiries, contact us.
